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on MENA - Middle East and North Africa |
| By: | International Monetary Fund |
| Abstract: | Egypt entered the recent war in the Middle East from a much stronger macroeconomic position than in previous episodes—supported by solid growth, declining inflation, stronger external buffers, and an improved primary fiscal balance—and responded swiftly with an orthodox policy mix. External conditions have since improved markedly following the U.S.–Iran agreement and broader regional de-escalation. Nonetheless, vulnerabilities remain elevated, reflecting high public debt and large gross financing needs. Accelerating reforms to reduce the state’s footprint and support the private sector remains essential. |
| Keywords: | divestment proceeds; monetary policy consultation; sovereign bond; transaction adviser; financial market; balance data; Exchange rates; Inflation; Middle East; Global; Central Asia |
| Date: | 2026–08–13 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:2026/224 |
| By: | International Monetary Fund |
| Abstract: | The Saudi economy has thus far proven resilient in the face of the war in the Middle East, supported by strong fundamentals, diversified oil and logistics infrastructure, and the authorities’ efforts to ease bottlenecks. The war nonetheless disrupted its momentum, curtailing oil exports and weighing on non-oil activity and confidence. |
| Keywords: | totaling SDR; Imf executive board; labor market outcome; SDR million; about SDR; Oil; Sovereign debt restructuring; Oil exports; Financial sector stability; Middle East; Global; Middle East and Central Asia; Sub-Saharan Africa; Central Asia |
| Date: | 2026–07–29 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfscr:2026/210 |
| By: | Aysun Hızıroğlu Aygün; Murat Güray Kırdar; Murat Koyuncu; Quentin Stoeffler |
| Abstract: | A central concern with social and humanitarian assistance is that unconditional cash transfers might discourage work among recipients. Refugees, however, differ from the chronically poor households in most cash-transfer studies. Displaced from once-stable livelihoods, many retain skills and labor-force attachment that transfers might help reactivate. We study this question using the largest humanitarian cash transfer scheme in the world, the Emergency Social Safety Net (ESSN) in Turkey, which for most of the past decade hosted more refugees than any other country. Drawing on a survey designed to represent Turkey's refugee population, we exploit the program's dependency-ratio eligibility rule in a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of cash transfers on refugee employment. Far from discouraging work, we find that receiving cash transfers increases the probability that any man in the household works by 13.2 percentage points and the share of working men by 19.3 percentage points. We find no evidence of an effect on refugee women's already-low labor supply. A design-based local-randomization analysis around the eligibility cutoff corroborates these responses with exact finite-sample inference, implying effects of 9.8 and 17.4 percentage points, respectively. Turning to mechanisms, we find that the transfers improve access to information, reduce reliance on harmful food-coping strategies, and raise enrollment in Turkish language courses. The transfers also raise spending on education. These findings suggest that cash transfers relax the liquidity and information constraints that refugees face in the labor market rather than inducing a shift toward leisure. |
| Keywords: | humanitarian assistance; forced displacement; unconditional cash transfers; social protection; work disincentives; regression discontinuity design; Turkey |
| JEL: | I38 J21 J22 J61 O15 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26221 |
| By: | Zoubir Faical (Ecole Supérieure de Technologie d'Agadir - Université Ibn Zohr = Ibn Zohr University [Agadir]) |
| Abstract: | As the prevailing paradigm in corporate governance, the shareholder model establishes the board of directors as the sentinel of shareholder interests. To safeguard the prerogatives of this "residual claimant, " the board is structured through mechanisms centered on a categorical principle: independence from managerial power. Compelling as it may be, this conception is inspired by a mythical model of the corporation where dispersed ownership incentivizes shareholders to act as free riders. However, contemporary capitalism is characterized by concentrated ownership and the dominance of controlling shareholders who shape oversight bodies, including the board of directors. In this context, the primary challenge is no longer protecting shareholders from managerial opportunism, but rather shielding minority shareholders from the hegemony of controlling blocks. This research contends that traditional board attributes are ineffective in concentrated ownership settings and fail to generate shareholder value. This thesis is empirically tested through four hypotheses using the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) on a panel of non-financial companies listed on the Casablanca Stock Exchange between 2006 and 2011. The findings confirm the ineffectiveness of shareholder-oriented governance recommendations within the context of ownership concentration. They call for a thorough reform of legislation and corporate governance codes, as their current underpinnings appear disconnected from the realities of joint-stock companies in Morocco. |
| Abstract: | Faisant autorité de loi en gouvernance d'entreprise, le modèle actionnarial érige le conseil d'administration en sentinelle de l'intérêt de l'actionnaire. Pour sanctuariser les intérêts de ce créancier résiduel, le conseil d'administration est ciselé en mécanismes articulés autour d'un principe catégorique : l'indépendance vis-à-vis du pouvoir managérial. Aussi séduisante soit-elle, cette conception s'inspire d'un modèle mythique de la société où la diffusion du capital pousse l'actionnaire à se comporter en passager clandestin. Or, le capitalisme contemporain se caractérise par la concentration du capital et la domination des actionnaires de contrôle qui façonnent les organes de surveillance comme le conseil d'administration. Dans ce contexte, l'enjeu n'est plus tant de protéger les actionnaires contre l'opportunisme des managers que de prémunir les minoritaires contre l'hégémonie des actionnaires de contrôle. Cette recherche soutient que les attributs classiques du conseil d'administration sont inopérants en situation de capital concentré et ne créent pas de valeur actionnariale. Cette thèse est testée empiriquement à travers quatre hypothèses par la méthode des moments généralisés sur un panel de sociétés non financières cotées à la bourse de Casablanca entre 2006 et 2011. Les résultats confirment l'inefficacité des recommandations de la gouvernance actionnariale dans le contexte de concentration de l'actionnariat. Ils appellent à une refonte de la législation et des codes de gouvernance d'entreprise, dont l'inspiration actuelle semble déconnectée des sociétés par actions au Maroc. |
| Keywords: | shareholder governance, shareholder value creation, ownership concentration, Dynamic Panel Data Model, Board of Directors, création de valeur actionnariale, Concentration du capital, modèle dynamique en données de panel Board of Directors, gouvernance actionnariale, Conseil d'administration |
| Date: | 2025–10–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05638855 |
| By: | Magesan, Arvind; Morales, Juan S.; Muço, Arieda |
| Abstract: | We study how legal threats to social media platforms shape online political communication. We exploit the sharp implementation of a 2020 Turkish law that required social media companies to establish local offices and provide user data to the government on request. Assembling a panel of over 700 Twitter users and 7 million posts, we use a differences-in-differences design to compare dissenters, individuals publicly critical of the reform when announced, to other groups unlikely to be affected, such as celebrities. We find that dissenters and political exiles post 15-20 percent fewer tweets following implementation, and engagement with their content falls sharply. These short-run chilling effects emerge despite limited platform compliance, indicating that anticipated enforcement risk, rather than actual enforcement, drives the effect. In the long run, the chilling effects dissipate. Our findings suggest that states can govern online speech indirectly, by regulating platforms rather than users, but that such effects may be self-limiting in the absence of visible enforcement. |
| Date: | 2026–08–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:j4hb8_v1 |
| By: | Cevat Giray Aksoy; Aya Aboulhosn; Berkay Ozcan |
| Abstract: | Research and policy debates on population aging typically assume that immigration matters only through immigrants' own fertility and its impact on total population size, ignoring effects on natives' fertility. We study this margin in the context of the large inflow of Syrian refugees into Türkiye after 2011. Using an instrumental-variables strategy, we provide evidence that greater local exposure to refugees increases native fertility. Drawing on complete birth histories from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that the response operates primarily through earlier entry into motherhood and is concentrated among younger women. The result holds across three independent datasets, including administrative birth registers, and is mirrored in women's stated ideal number of children. Examining potential mechanisms, we find the evidence most consistent with improved household economic security and find no support for channels operating through housing costs or the use of paid childcare. |
| Keywords: | forced migration; fertility; refugees |
| JEL: | J13 R23 F22 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26212 |
| By: | Abdel Ghany, Jasmin; Romell, Emma; Wilde, Joshua |
| Abstract: | A large body of research documents the harm that armed conflict inflicts on the health of populations in conflict zones. Yet if violence injures collectivities rather than only those who experience it directly, its health consequences should extend to those who identify with affected populations wherever they reside. We test this hypothesis by examining the effects of the October 7, 2023, attacks in Israel and the ensuing onset of the Gaza War on infant health in the United States among mothers born in Israel, the West Bank, and neighboring, Arab, and Muslim-majority countries. In a novel application of the event-study design, we trace month-by-month changes in preterm birth and low birthweight – outcomes that shape health and socioeconomic attainment throughout the life course. Our analyses show that the Israel-born diaspora experienced an immediate, short-lived reversal in their previously substantial infant health advantage after the October 7 attacks. Infant health also deteriorated among mothers born in neighboring, other Arab, and other Muslim-majority countries. These findings indicate that the health consequences of violence are not confined to the conflict zone but extend to geographically distant diaspora communities who are connected to the affected populations by shared national and ethnic origin and religion. |
| Date: | 2026–08–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:zhyr7_v1 |
| By: | Bayatlioglu, Rifat |
| Abstract: | The paper brings together the findings and policy recommendations of a comparative study examining Türkiye's global standing across three axes: income-distribution inequality, inflation, and the informal/illicit-money economy. The study's central motivation is that these three indicators should not be treated as independent technical issues, but as an integrated problem area that mutually reinforces itself and directly affects consumers' purchasing power, wealth distribution, and trust in the market. |
| Keywords: | informal economy, illicit money, money laundering, income inequality, Gini coefficient, inflation, FATF grey list, Türkiye, consumer protection, tax justice |
| JEL: | E0 |
| Date: | 2026–08–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:130348 |
| By: | Percha, Carlin |
| Abstract: | Whether violence in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is reciprocal — each side's lethal action provoking the other's — has been studied largely through vector-autoregression on time-binned counts, an approach that obscures the timing, branching structure, and directionality of response. We model lethal violence in the two directions as a bivariate Hawkes process, a continuous-time self- and mutually-exciting point process, using individual-incident fatality records from the Second Intifada through October 2023. Reciprocal excitation is genuine but profoundly asymmetric: a single Palestinian-to-Israeli event triggers on the order of one subsequent Israeli lethal event, nearly thirty times the reverse coupling. The asymmetry survives placebo, regime-detection, and flexible-baseline checks designed to rule out a common-driver confound, and goodness-of-fit testing confirms the models describe the data adequately. Allowing the couplings to take either sign, we find no evidence of deterrence in either direction. The strength of the Israeli response is statistically indistinguishable across the conflict's two main eras, but its speed is not: the characteristic response lag roughly halves between the Intifada and the later Gaza-war period, a temporal change binned methods cannot represent. Resolving the Israeli-to-Palestinian direction into its Gaza and West Bank theaters reveals that they operate as nearly independent systems: violence within each is strongly self-exciting while cross-theater coupling is negligible, and the reciprocal dynamic that dominates the pooled analysis is localized almost entirely to the West Bank, whereas Gaza's violence is driven by internal escalation. What appears in aggregate as a single cycle is, spatially, two barely-interacting logics — a separation we argue reflects the differential governance of the two territories rather than any natural division of the conflict. A three-stream extension shows settler violence to be a distinct channel: reactive to Palestinian action, increasingly self-exciting, and temporally preceding rather than following state violence. All findings replicate on an independently constructed event dataset. We document these regularities for 2000–2023 and set out why we do not extend them through the subsequent war: individual-incident records for that period exist, but not on a footing commensurable with the present analysis. |
| Date: | 2026–08–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:rgh45_v1 |